Sunday, July 31, 2011

Over the next week or so I'll be documenting the process for making the mold for Egg. Much thanks to Justin C for helping me through the process and using the Egg as a demo mold in his awesome mold making class. Basically at the end of this process I will have a mold in the shape of the Egg character that I can used to make as many duplicate puppets as I need (or until the mold wears out).

The first step is making the sculpt of the character. I make a quick and dirty armature by braiding some wire around into the general shape of Egg and built up the shape of Egg around it with Super Sculpy. This picture is from an early version of the sculpt. I forgot to take a picture of the final Egg before it went into the mold! But hopefully this picture gives a general idea.

The next step is then to build up clay around this figure for the bottom half of the mold. Pics of that coming soon!

I'm starting to work out ideas for my second year film. It will most likely star an Egg and his Bird, two best friends that live in a kitchen and travel to different dimensions by jumping in drawers and cabinets. Here are some sketches. I'm starting to work on sculpting the Egg, pictures will be up soon.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

This small toy flashlight was part of the inspiration of this project.

I took it apart and found that it used a pretty simple set up and thought that maybe the cell could be a series of images instead of just one.

After some further research I found this old animation machine. Though much larger, it uses a similar design, where a large glass disk is spun and a Gleisser tube flashes light though the transparencies to create a weak projection.

So will all of this fit into a flashlight? I don't know! But I'm going to start taking apart some larger toy flashlights soon like this one to find out.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Currently in the midst of brainstorming a new installation / product / animation idea. Here is an official proposal I wrote up:

Inspired by cave paintings, flashlights, early animation devices and visual music, I'd like to create a space where an audience can interactively create visuals to accompany a live musical performance. I will design a hand cranked animation flashlight that essentially allows one to project a simple animation cycle. 15-20 people will be given these flashlights and invited into a fort made out of paper or blankets. While a live group of musicians plays campfire jingles the audience will be invited to project their animated flashlights onto the fort walls. Each flashlight will contain a different animated sequence. The audience can choose how the animated sequences interact and hopefully spontaneous and unique stories will develop with each performance.